CSPAN Booknotes

This short, but overlong, book, which (God help us) comes from something
called the Library
of Contemporary Thought, offers pulp fiction writer Walter Mosley the
opportunity to share his opinion on how to reform America culture and politics.
Sadly, he proceeds to embarrass himself utterly.

Everywhere I look I see chains, from the planned
obsolescence that binds us to an endless line of
ever more useless machines to captivating television
shows about nothing to the value of the dollar
bills insecurely nestled at the bottom of my pocket.

For hundreds of years, Africans (an estimated 10 million) were captured,
chained and sold; taken by force to America in the festering bowels of
transport ships; sold again and enslaved by white masters; denied all rights
and freedoms; forced to work from cradle to grave; beaten; raped; murdered;
their families split apart on a whim. This entire system is a stinking
blot upon the nation's honor, one which whites had a chance to expunge
with the bloodshed and destruction of the Civil War, but which was immediately
replenished when frightened and embittered Southerners, with the willing
acquiescence of their Northern countrymen, imposed a system of apartheid
on the newly freed black population. This time, the outrage of Jim
Crow persisted until blacks themselves, in an awe inspiring display
of moral and physical courage, used peaceful civil disobedience to shame
white America into finally giving them the equal rights they'd long been
promised. How can anyone compare this legacy of genuine and horrifying
oppression to such trivial matters as overconsumption of appliances and
watching too much Seinfeld ?

Mosley actually has the temerity at one point to say that : "There is
an echo of Jim
Crow in the HMO..." One needn't love HMOs to recognize the difference
between a mostly successful effort to provide cheap health care, on the
one hand, and, on the other, the systematic and official enforcement
of political and economic discrimination against an entire segment of the
population based solely on the color of their skin. The effort to
equate the two is so absurd as not to deserve to be taken seriously.

Equally unserious is Mosely's prescription for what should be done to
free us from the bondage of capitalism :

(1) Take a self-imposed break from
electronic media (though for some reason print media is
allowed)

(2) Tell the truth once a day.

(3) Make a list of the things you
demand from the system.

Please...

By the time he gets to his presidential platform you're unsure whether
the whole book isn't just an elaborate hoax. Here's what he proposes
: educate children; take care of the aged; pay doctors' medical malpractice
premiums; educate more doctors and nurses; either legalize drugs or stop
their importation into the country; have a conference on capital punishment;
create rights to a living wage, health care, and an equal share in the
Gross Domestic Product; and enter into international agreements to assure
the same to all foreign workers too. As a candidate he would be some
kind of weird melding of Bill Clinton, proposing only programs that everyone
supports, and Lenin, reintroducing socialism.

What's most surprising, or maybe not, about all of this, is that the
radical egalitarianism that he envisions would essentially return him,
and the rest of us, to the plantation. He calls it utopian, but at
every step his politics requires that the freedom of some be curtailed
in order to benefit others. In his great autobiography, Up
From Slavery, Booker T. Washington talks about the terror with which
many newly freed blacks faced the prospect of freedom, after the Civil
War. A people who had been completely, though involuntarily, dependent
on the largesse of their masters was suddenly thrust out into the world
and told to fend for themselves. How could this not have been frightening
? And, indeed, freedom, in the words of the old 60s slogan, isn't
free. It requires that each of us take responsibility for ourselves
and inevitably some will do better than others. But it is deeply
discouraging that, some 150 years later--after a 20th Century in which
his ideas were already tested and found to lead not to Utopia but to the
Gulag--at least one of their descendants is no more prepared to leave the
plantation than they were.

There's a scene at the end of the movie version of Devil in a Blue
Dress that is one of the most ineffably poignant in all of film.
Ezekiel Rawlins (Denzel Washington) is standing in the street in front
of his house, just looking around his middle class neighborhood.
The viewer is achingly aware that where the scene depicts nuclear families,
homeowners, workers, a people whose great achievement is to have survived
all that the white man tried doing to them and to have built this community
in the face of those odds, in just a few short years that was all destroyed
by the presumably well-intentioned replacement of the ideal of self-reliance
by a system of Big Government paternalism. You can't help but wonder
if that community might have continued to thrive if they'd simply been
left to themselves, rather than being submitted to the Great
Society. What a high price was paid when freedom, however challenging,
was replaced by security. Apparently, Mosley believes it's worth
paying again. I beg to differ.

Comments:

Which nice homes no longer exist thanks to the Democrats making blacks dependents of the state.

- oj

- Jan-08-2006, 10:38

*******************************************************

"Mr.Mosely is entitled to his opinion as are you. The only part of the review I disagreed with(and the part that inadvertently reveals the race of the reviewer to be white) is your take on the last scene of "Devil in a Blue Dress". "The Great Society propgrams did not create poverty and hopelessnes black communities. To say so reveals an ignorance of history beyond my power to dispel. There are many middle class and working class black enclaves all across the U.S. These were achieved DESPITE the efforts of many racist americans. Easy is simply carrying on the battle that so many of us fight everyday and his look of satisfaction at the end of the movie is his simple happiness in getting to keep his home.

- Neoptolemus

- May-23-2003, 21:58

*******************************************************

"Mr.Mosely is entitled to his opinion as are you. The only part of the review I disagreed with(and the part that inadvertently reveals the race of the reviewer to be white) is your take on the last scene of "Devil in a Blue Dress". "The Great Society propgrams did not create poverty and hopelessnes black communities. To say so reveals an ignorance of history beyond my power to dispel. There are many middle class and working class black enclaves all across the U.S. These were achieved DESPITE the efforts of many racist americans. Easy is simply carrying on the battle that so many of us fight everyday and his look of satisfaction at the end of the movie is his simple happiness in getting to keep his home.

- Neoptolemus

- May-23-2003, 21:58

*******************************************************

"Mr.Mosely is entitled to his opinion as are you. The only part of the review I disagreed with(and the part that inadvertently reveals the race of the reviewer to be white) is your take on the last scene of "Devil in a Blue Dress". "The Great Society propgrams did not create poverty and hopelessnes black communities. To say so reveals an ignorance of history beyond my power to dispel. There are many middle class and working class black enclaves all across the U.S. These were achieved DESPITE the efforts of many racist americans. Easy is simply carrying on the battle that so many of us fight everyday and his look of satisfaction at the end of the movie is his simple happiness in getting to keep his home.

- Neoptolemus

- May-23-2003, 21:58

*******************************************************

you are an ignorant probably upper class white man who wants to protect your family's current status and are t he exact problem with this capitalistic nation

love poor scottish american (no im not "white" there is no such thing)